Turn the cameras on the architecture of exclusion in Calais
The “Jungle” is closed. Fences are up. A wall has been built. Gendarmeres patrol the highways and private security monitors city parks. The camp that housed approximately ten thousand people in the fall of 2016 is now an expanse of grass and shrubs blanketing sandy dunes. Only the red signs declaring Accès Interdit (“access forbidden”) allude to the recent history of the site.
Over the past few years, Calais, a port city in northern France, has been transformed by the stream of asylum seekers trying to get to the United Kingdom. Refugees began to gather there with the opening of the channel tunnel in 1994, and various camps have sheltered people in the area since the Red Cross opened a center in 1999. By 2010, numbers had started to increase, and in 2015, as more displaced people fled Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan, and other conflict zones, the informal camp, known as the “Jungle,” became densely populated. Although the refugee camp was cleared in October 2016, the crisis has not been solved.
Instead, it has taken on a new form.
As Calais became a major transit point for people seeking asylum in the UK, it also turned into an important site for photography. You may have seen some of the images: haphazard clusters of camping tents — blue, green, and grey — along with make-shift plywood shelters wrapped in plastic, set against bleak shrub-land on the outskirts of the city. The detritus of abandoned living spaces strewn across worn terrain. Crowds of young African men gathered along the roadside or lining up to board buses. Or perhaps you have seen photographs of interactions between French police and people living in the camp: officers monitoring a group of men having a meal; Gendarmeres chasing asylum seekers trying to climb onto trucks near the port; Riot police evicting people prior to demolishing the camp.
Photographs, especially those circulated by mainstream news agencies, have influenced public perceptions of the crisis. Striking images by accomplished photojournalists — Tyler Hicks, Philippe Huguen, Mauricio Lima and many others — bear witness to the struggles faced by refugees. They have produced compelling scenes that attest to conditions in the camp and humanize their subjects. They have also documented instances of police violence. Their work has been published by The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, and other news outlets. Other photographers, such as Daniel Castro Garcia, have worked closely with their subjects to tell the stories of engineers, statisticians, musicians, and teachers who have fled their homes for a variety of reasons, but almost always because their lives were at risk.
Of the thousands of images depicting the crisis in Calais, most focus on the refugees. And while their experiences are a crucial part of the story, this has circumscribed how we understand the crisis. There are broader issues at stake.
Now that the camp has closed and most of the asylum seekers have been dispersed to other areas of France, it might seem as though the story of Europe’s refugee crisis has gone elsewhere. On my recent visit, it was clear that the photographers have moved on. But the refugee crisis cannot be understood merely by looking at images of displaced people, and it is time to take another look at Calais.
The northern port city has become a militarized zone. France and Britain have constructed a security apparatus to protect the economic and political interests of a select few.
There is over 40 km of fencing topped with coils of razor wire along the highway leading to the Channel Tunnel. The densely woven mesh panel system repels attempts to cut or climb. There is a four-meter high concrete wall along the road near the site of the former camp. I saw police posted along the motorway to prevent people from trying to get on trucks. The port is under video surveillance, and trucks pass through scanners that can detect a human heartbeat.
Freight and passenger trains are also closely monitored. Police turn up at level crossings when a train passes through. The Calais-Fréthun Eurostar terminal is heavily guarded with electrified fencing, more than 500 surveillance cameras, and drones equipped with thermal imaging.
Perhaps most ruthless are the less visible forms of surveillance and interference. Now that the camp has been demolished, these include interrupting food and water distribution and the practice of tracking people so they cannot rest. Whether in the parks, along the canal, or by the side of a road, wherever you see a refugee, you’ll also see a police officer keeping watch.
Calais’s security is largely funded by the UK. The wall alone cost £2 million. In the fall of 2016, a pledge of £36 million was added to the nearly £20 million already committed during 2014 and 2015. Despite all the talk of austerity measures, politicians in the UK have decided to spend vast sums of money in order to keep refugees out. Instead of financing security, they could fund settlement programs, or as Peter Sutherland, former United Nations special representative on migration, suggested, the UK and France could open a center “that would allow people wanting to claim asylum in Britain to have their cases heard without risking their lives” by trying to hide on trucks and trains.
We need to see images that capture the excess of this security apparatus in order to understand how it goes beyond reasonable border control measures. Let’s turn the cameras on the architecture of exclusion. Let us see photographs of the fortress that Calais has become.
We need international media outlets to put Calais back in the news. Many people are disgusted by Israel’s separation barrier — also called a wall of apartheid — in the West Bank. There has been much criticism of the border barriers built in eastern European countries such as Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, and Macedonia in response to the refugee crisis. Millions of Americans are appalled at Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the border with Mexico. The UK and France have collaborated on this very project. Asylum seekers cannot be treated as merely a security problem.
Sarah Bassnett is an associate professor at Western University in Canada and author of Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City. Her current research examines the photography of global migration. Follow her on Twitter @sarah_bassnett.
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